In the third of our Lent series in which contributors select a book they turn to in difficult times, a biographer reaches for a collection of poems by the American poet W.S. Merwin that bring the world back to life
Speaking for myself, the difficult times are the ones when meaning slips away, and everything seems to stand in the shadow of itself. So it’s not in the very moment of crisis – the knife on my throat in a dark street, the pandemic hospital call that starts, “Do you have someone there with you?”, a divorce announcement by text message – that I’ve found myself unable to cope, but in its long aftermath. I often feel guilty about this. “The greatest” of Paul’s great trio of virtues may be love, but if anything, I have even greater struggles with faith and hope.
This is why the writing that’s helped me get through the worst times in my life hasn’t been overtly profound in a proverbial or cosmological style. Nor has it been complex. In the greatest pain, I can’t reread the canonical modernist novels that are my literary touchstone. No philosophy or essays; not even those great poets of ideas, Czeslaw Milosz, T.S. Eliot, Mahmoud Darwish, who map human journeys with such beautiful command. I just need something that will bring the world back to life.
